We have re-named him. Gunter Alexis is now Gunner Avery. It's official.

He is now 4 1/2 months old and still doing great. He rolls around a lot and I put him to sleep with the bolster, to keep him on his back, just to be safe.

I've been on a bad worry trip lately and have been reading a lot about how the terribly unfortunate deaths of many precious, innocent  babies came about. It's not that I'm morbid, I'm jyst trying to learn from other people's mistakes, and I have. Just recently, 2 babies died in the area: one got SIDS while sleeping on his father's chest and the other was accidentally smothered by her mother who fell asleep while breastfeeding herlying down. Those are two things I will be sure to be more careful about. As nice as it is to have baby sleep on your chest, it amounts to a form of the infamous 'tummy sleeping' that increases the risk for SIDS. I know Gunner is over 4 months now, but still, I don't want to take any chances.

I now understand why they say SIDS is not caused by suffocation even though they warn the tummy sleeping, blankets, and stuffies increase the risk. It is because it is (at least in some cases) caused by re-breathing stale air that has higher concentrations of CO2 in it, which leads to some kind of shut-down in the brain that stops breathing and cannot be reversed even with prompt CPR. I wish someon had explained this to me earlier, because i would have taken it more seriously and would have taken less risks such as breast feeding while sleeping, putting my covers over him in bed, letting him sleep in the bassinette past 3 months of age.

I got a good scare a week ago when I found him sleeping in there with his face burrowed into the side padding. He was in such a deep sleep, I couldn't even see him breathing and when I picked him up he was so out cold he did not startle, but was just completely floppy. It took a bit to get a reaction out of him and assure myself he was ok. I certainly won't let him sleep in the bassinette anymore. I though it was just a question of the baby not fitting in there after a certain age, and never realized it was a matter of him becoming more mobile and able to smush his face into the side padding and re-breathe air.

Throughout my pregnancy and even for the first couple of months after his birth, I remember feeling distant from him. He felt like a little stranger. As sweet and angelic as he was, I didn't feel all that attached to him, to be honest. That's not to say I didn't love or care for him, or that I would not have even laid down my life for him, but I felt like I didn't know him. But now, I am more than solidly attached and it's a little scary because he has become so precious to me that I can't imagine how I would cope with it if anything ever happened to him. I think that after  having had two miscarriages, this was precicely the reason I didn't get atached to him earlier on. There was a certain freedom to that: I left him with friends and didn't give it a second thought, and I told myself I would not hold him back in life because of my own fears. But now, I am afraid and I will have to make an effort if I want to make sure I don't become one of those crazy overprotective mothers.

I call him my little Sugar Plum and Plum Pudding these days. I could hold him all day, give him coutless kisses, gaze at him for hours. Now I am finally 'in love with my baby'. To me, his conception, gestation and birth were all so miraculous and I got lucky ever time there was a stituation where something could have gone wrong. God seems to have really wanted to give me this baby against all odds, and I try to assure myself that this is the baby that the Holy Spirit promised me I would have, years ago before I ever even met Arron, when I was praying and had a vision of myself holding a chubby little blond baby boy. WHen I met Arron, I told him right away that I was going to have his baby and that it would b a little blond boy and that God had told me so. And here he is, just like the Spirit showed me. I have to trust God that everything will be ok and that even if it isn't, He will enable me to handle it. He gave me this baby for a reason, I just don't know yet what that reason was, opther than just to show me that He loves me and has heard my prayers. And that is reason enough.

Having this sweet baby also shows me something else that is painful to face. I always knew my mother didn't love me in the way mothers usually love their children, the evidence of that being the fact that she abused me, beat me, called me names, and locked me in the cellar, making me stay down there with the lights off for hourse when I was only a little child. She was cruel and she took her own frustrations out on me. I can't imagine ever doing anything like that to my child, this sweet, tiny, innocent creature who is utterly dependant on me. Now I know just how cruel my mother really was. Now I know just how much her love was lacking. This baby is the apple of my eye, perfect as he is, and I want nothing but to nurture, love and encourage him as he takes his first steps on the road of life. I realize now just what a selfish narcissist my mother really is, to consider her children as mainly just reflections on her, like any of her other possessions, and to write me off so quickly as defective because it was easier than admitting that if there was any damage in me, she had caused it herself.  Now, seeing how perfect my child has come into the world, I know that he knows only what I show him, he learns only through what he experiences and if he grows up to feel unloved and unlovable, it will only be because I didn't love him enough. There is nothing wrong with him and there was never anything wrong with me, other than that I was constantly made to feel there was. Instead of building me up, my mother worked at demolishing me. Now that I have a child of my own and I know what it is to love your child, it is all too painfully clear to me that my mother really didn't love me. She always said that people like me (meaning not 'well-off' enough) shouldn't have children, but now I see that that has always been a lie and that it is people like her, who are unable to love unconditionally, who shouldn't have children.

It's amazing how this has caused a veil to be lifted and allowed me to see how thing really are. My mother is not the giant I thought her to be, she is just a small, misguided woman, who loved Mammon more than God and who sacrificed her daughter to her idols.

So much for getting him off on the good foot

When Arron and i thought of the name Gunter, I brought it up with my mother who asked,
"Is it 'Gunter' (pronounced Goonter) or Guenter (pronounced with a German ue which we don't even have in English)."
I said 'Guenter', and she said she liked that and that I had had a cousin with that name who died in WWI. SInce we had to pick something and didn't want to name him after a shopping mall (Alexis Meehan = Alexis Nihon Plaza), we settled on that.

As soon as I started telling people his name was Gunter, I realized there was a problem because
- No one can pronounce Guenter
- People say Goonter
- Or they say Gunther with a 'th'
- No-one says, 'What a nice name!'. They just nod like 'I see...' surely thinking 'WTF?'

We're screwed. I gave him a name that will be constantly mispronounced, as far as I can tell. Even in French, they say Goonter. I hate that. But I'm used to calling him Gunter. In other words, I don't know what to do.

Once again, I could
- call him Gunter and deal with mispronunciations
- call him by his middle name, Alexis, and deal with somparisons to the shopping mall
- call him Gunnar, which is the Scandinavian version of Gunter
- call him something completely different. But what?

Anyone have an opinion???

One for Ripley

For the last week, Gunter has been completely blowing us all away with his tour-de-force baby trick: holding his own baba at only 3 months old! We can hardly believe it either, but it's true. See for yourselves.

1st Thankgiving with Baby

Gunter is getting big fast, but not toooooo fast. He just graduated to the 3-6 month size but can still fit into some of his earlier outfits.

While he is working hard on putting on the pounds, I'm working just as hard on losing them. I have finally started to shed a bit of  that baby weight but it's a slow and unnerving process. My high point this month was when I got on the scale at the pharmacy and it told me I had lost 4 lbs. Lucky for the scale, too, cause I was about ready to take a sledge hammer to it.

I'm a little depressed about not getting out much and having all my days so identical, they blur into each other. I hate to admit it, but sometimes I don't want to get up in the morning and I just wish Gunny Bunny would shut up and let me sleep till about 2:00 pm, but no such luck: he's rarin' to go putter around and coo.

He had his first outing to church on Sunday. I got roped into it by Jana, who ended up standing me up. Her excuse?  'Ah, sorry I didn't call: I don't feel so good, had a late night, ya know...'  I think she took it the wrong way when they told her Jesus loves sinners.

 Yesterday, Arron and I took the Metro to make the long trek up to Cote-Vertu to join Kalina and her family for Thanksgiving dinner. Gunter was an angel the whole time, smiled and cooed at everyone, let the kids play with him like he was a little doll (Baby Alive, to be exact. These kids know their dolls), and fell asleep on Kalin's brother Sean's lap. I am so in love with my little Jelly Bean, my perfect angel. It's still hard to believe we really made it after all those hard times and have our very own little guy. The fact that I was pregnant had barely sunken in when he arrived. Arron and I feel like the luckiest people in the world- we are so blessed and have so much to give thanks for this year.